Selena
by Washbrained
Summary: The secret of how Tony's mother died is finally revealed. Warning: very gruesome! Not for the faint of heart. Rated for graphic scenes of child abuse, insanity, murder, mutilation, and gore.


**H.: **Nobody really knows how Tony's mother died, so here's my twisted take on it.

Disclaimer: I do not own NCIS. Whoop dee flippin doo.

* * *

Tony crept through the tunnel-like halls of his father's mansion, fear pinching his heart tauntingly with every apprehensive step he took. Clutched in his trembling hands was a worn teddy bear, burgundy cloth thin and faded with years of excessive use. One button hung loosely from where it had taken up the role of Teddy's left eye, threatening to leave the bear half-blind. Tony fingered the button absent-mindedly, giving the string that supported it an occasional, nervous tug. He paused as the room he was destined to came into view. A kind of terrified dread intoxicated him, slipping like a thief into his pores and turning his blood cold. He fidgeted uncomfortably.

A hand suddenly fell on his tensed shoulder, and he lurched forward involuntarily, whirling around to face whatever had snuck up behind him. He looked up into the pale face of Sabrina, one of the family maids, and released a shaky breath that he had not realized was being held captive in his lungs. Sabrina tried to give him a reassuring smile but ended up grimacing down at him.

"Calm down, _bambino_, it is only me. I came to bring your mother some lunch."

A considerably small tray rested on her calloused hands, and on it was a steaming plate of spaghetti bolognesa, a few slices of bruschetta, and a bowl of freshly picked olives. Tony knew his mother would eat little to none of the food. She hungered for something else, something Tony's young mind could not quite comprehend, although its malevolence was clear. She was never satisfied with whatever poison she fed on.

Sabrina shifted the weight of the tray and eyed Tony anxiously.

"What are you doing here, Anthony?"

Tony tightened his grip on his teddy bear subconsciously and looked down the hall with fearful eyes.

"Father requested I spend some time with mother before lunch," he explained timidly, a hint of sarcasm tainting his words. His father never requested anything, he **demanded **it.

Sabrina's troubled eyes softened with understanding, and she patted Tony's arm in an uncertain display of sympathy.

"Well, come on then, Anthony," she coaxed, balancing the tray on her right hand and cradling Tony's hand with her left. Her fingers bled warmth into his shaking palm, and he savored the calidity greedily, knowing that he may very well never be able to enjoy this calming sensation a second time. They trudged towards the room at the end of the hall. When they reached the black wooden door that cut off its inhabitants from a compassionless world, they stopped and merely stood there, staring up at the door. It glared back, ominous. Tony shivered.

Hesitantly, almost timorously, Sabrina freed her hand from Tony's grip and reached up with a loosely clenched fist to knock on the door, half expecting the obsidian wood to manifest a set of needle-sharp teeth and rip her arm clean out of its socket. No one answered. Unsurprised, Sabrina grabbed the doorknob (carefully lest it should scald her palm) and twisted it. The door parted from its frame with a slow, drawling creak.

The stench hit them first. A revolting, choking stench of decayed food, old urine, and a filthy, rotting human body tore at their nostrils and infected their stomachs. Tony buried his nose in Teddy's worn skin and pulled his lips into his mouth to keep from gagging. Sabrina's face scrunched up in disgust, but she entered the room anyways. Tony followed.

The darkness was next to pollute their senses. Its sheer blackness was blinding, and Sabrina fumbled for the light switch, setting the tray on what she believed to be a chair. Tony shut his eyes when the maid found the switch and lifted it, an all-too-familiar dread plaguing the chilled blood that crawled through his veins. At the sound of Sabrina picking up the tray again, he slowly opened his eyes, his vision growing centimeter by centimeter.

The sight was always the worst attack of all.

On a large, king-sized bed that stood majestically yet hauntingly against the wall farthest from the door, its mattresses veiled in sapphire sheets and azure comforters, a dark canopy flowing like an eerie waterfall around the blankets, lay Selena. His mother.

At a first glance, it was impossible to define her as human. Stretched, waxy skin hung wistfully from her bones, emphasizing her skeletal frame. Her hands, resting on the dark blue blankets, were hooked into permanent claws, the skin sagging around the osseous fingers. Dried blood was cemented underneath the long, splintered fingernails.

The sepia hair that dangled limply from the skull could have been beautiful had it not been so putridly filthy and greasy. In the dim, nearly nonexistent light that streamed in from the hall, the grime that clumped the hair together gleamed repulsively.

Her face was the foulest feature. Chapped lips, so cracked that they bled down her chin whenever she moved them, were pulled back into a demented, wicked grin. Her beryl eyes blazed with malice, scorching into Tony's terrified hazel ones, charring him. Insanity was crudely etched into the irises.

"_Anthony..._" she slurred. Blood wept from her curled lips, staining maroon tears into her filthy nightgown. Tony's muscles clenched painfully as his body vainly attempted to ward the call away from his mind. Selena's voice dug through his mental barriers anyways, grating and grinding against his brain, licking the wounds over with a black tongue in mock apology. The jagged fangs of her voice punctured his mind and gushed venom into his head. He felt his body go weak as Selena tilted her head and lifted a claw to beckon him forward. He obeyed, her corrupt eyes hooking into his pounding heart and reeling him in, short-circuiting any thoughts of escape.

Tony reached the foot of the cursed bed as Sabrina laid the tray on his mother's lap and prepared her for her afternoon meal. Selena did not bother to spare the lunch even a first glance; her noxious eyes were fixed on Tony, flickering with malevolent glee. Tony hugged his bear tighter to his chest.

"Yes, mother?" he whispered meekly, growing smaller and weaker under her expectant gaze. His wavering voice widened her malignant grin, and she patted a bare section of the mattress in a twisted "come hither" gesture. Blood continued to seep through the cracks on her lips and rain down her chin.

Frozen in place by the overwhelming terror that gnashed against his clammy skin, he could not move. He did not want to move. Then Selena's eyes were boring into his again, trapping him as a spiderweb traps an ill-fated insect, and he went to her, void of thought. Her eyes were spiderwebs, and she was the black widow, the predator. Tony had no chance against this murderous creature; he was the fly. The **prey**.

Every strand of sense that swam in his brain protested wildly against his being seated, vulnerable, in the presence of this freakish hellion that lay too close for comfort, but without control, they were useless. Selena had stolen his control, it was stitched on her bloody smile, and Tony knew he would not get it back unless he sat down and obeyed her--

_yes, he would __**obey**__, like monstermommy's good little boy--_

so he sat.

Struggling into a semi-sitting position, she wrapped her bony arms around Tony's tense frame and held him to her. Tony couldn't breathe. The putrid smell she gave off made him sick and dizzy, and he choked into her brittle chest, suffocating. The arms around him were like chains, locking him in the dark, inescapable prison that was his mother's heart. Tony whimpered and tried to pull away, but she held him tightly, enclosing him, trapping him.

"Mother, please let me go," he whispered to her chest.

"_Si, signora,_" agreed Sabrina nervously, tapping the tray that rested on her mistress's lap. "_Per favore_, eat your food. _Per favore._"

Selena paid neither of their pleas any mind; if anything, she only squeezed her son harder, squeezing his life out. Heavy pearls of sweat began to accumulate on his forehead as his fear morphed into hyperventilation.

"_Signora--_"

"Mother, please!" Tony begged, panting wildly. He began to flail his arms and legs desperately. Her smell, her grip, her eyes, her bloody smile--it was smothering him, killing him. He had to get away.

Selena frowned but continued to hold Tony. "No, no, no, _bambino_," she cooed, her gravelly voice ripping the skin off his pulsing mind. "Stay with me. Stay with mommy."

Tony shook his head violently and whimpered again, squirming frantically in her grasp.

"Anthony, dear, stay," she murmured. Her words nipped at his brain, making him struggle more. He could hear the poorly restrained sobs of the housemaid as she hysterically begged her mistress to take to her meal. Her incomprehensive speech swirled in Tony's brain in a confusing whirl, and the frustration and strangling terror pricked at his eyes until tears began to form.

"Let go of me, mother!"

"Anthony, no, stay with me."

"_Signora, per favore!_"

"Let go!"

"Don't you love me, Anthony?"

"Just one bite, _signora_, just one!"

"Let go!"

"You would stay if you love me, Anthony."

"_Signora!_"

"I love you, Anthony."

"LET GO!"

Using all his weight, Tony shoved his mother back onto the bed, her skull smacking against the headboard, and threw himself off the bed. His forehead hit the edge of her mahogany nightstand with an excruciating thump, and blood dripped into his eyes. Selena sat up suddenly, glaring darkly at him. Her beryl eyes blazed with irrepressible rage and her lips were drawn back in a furious snarl, spilling blood on her teeth. With a livid scream, she grabbed her tray and hurled it against the wall. The plate of spaghetti shattered and red sauce slid down the wall like blood, staining floor.

Selena caged a fistful of slimy, sepia hair in her claws and tore it off her head, scattering the strands on her bed before scraping her nails down her cheeks, leaving long shreds of skin and angry gashes that poured scarlet poison, all the while screaming savagely. Tony mopped the blood out of his eyes and stared at his mother in utter terror, crawling backwards until his spine hit the wall. Selena glared at him, screeching through rotting teeth that were visibly grinding against each other, and without warning, she wrenched the sheets off her lap. Sabrina managed a garbled shriek before she hit the floor in a dead faint. Tony's mouth opened as if to scream, but only a kind of horrified moan escaped him.

Selena's legs were gone. The ends of her thighs were swollen with infection and jutted out unevenly, as if her legs had been poorly butchered with a jagged weapon. Tony knew his father had ruined her legs, but he had never imagined it in this way.

"I gave the little slut what she deserved," his father had declared when Tony innocently questioned him about it. "She's been walking around too much, going to other men's houses. As her husband, it was my duty to put her back in her place."

Tony shut his eyes, shut off the gruesome image of his mother's stubby thighs. The sickness overwhelmed him, and he had no control, his control was still sewn into Selena's snarling lips, and he couldn't stop himself from twisting around like a suffocating fish and retching violently on the wall. He dug his fingers into the wall, causing paint to chip off in crescent shapes, and uttered another horrified moan, tears of pain and terrified disgust pooling in his eyes. A few drops dove down and mingled with the vomit, and he trembled. He hugged himself pitifully and was mildly surprised to feel something fuzzy in his shaky embrace--he had not released his teddy bear since he entered this room of evil. Tony buried his face into Teddy and sobbed meekly as he turned away from the vomit. He uncovered one teary eye from the safety of Teddy's skin and watched his mother with horrified fascination.

She had managed to twist herself onto her stomach and was now clawing at the sheets, struggling to pull herself off the bed. Her hands shook violently with ire, and her beryl eyes seemed to engulf anything caught in its gaze in furious flames. Tony shrank back further into the wall, quivering. Selena clutched a fistful of sheets and suddenly lurched forward, landing in a writhing heap on the floor. Throwing her mutated thighs a murderous glare, she screamed bitterly at their uselessness, her screech quickly molding into a series of scratchy, barking, manic laughs. Tony stared as she flopped around on the floor, stumpy thighs kicking at the air with sickening _swoosh _sounds, screaming inbetween blood-chilling laughs. She began to roll from side to side, chanting as she did so.

"Ring around the rosie, a pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, WE ALL FALL DOWN!"

Suddenly still on the floor, she lifted her head with a strained grunt and drank up the sight of her gruesome thighs as if for the first time. For a couple of seconds, she allowed silence to reign. Tony didn't dare inhale another breath. He probably wouldn't have been able to, anyways--his lungs seemed paralyzed, like the oxygen had turned to cement and dried in his lungs. Selena continued to stare blankly at her butchered limbs. Then she let loose a piercing, howling scream that made the very walls shudder and Tony's blood evaporate from his body in an icy mist. Drained, he could only slump miserably against the vomit-soiled wall and watch as his mother threw her head back with incredible force, smacking it repeatedly against the floor until blood gushed from her skull and splattered on the floorboards.

Tony closed his eyes and curled up further into the wall when he heard a series of panicked footsteps charging up the stairs and down the eerie hall towards Selena's room. Placing his clammy palms over his ears, Tony bit back a whimper as the door suddenly swung open, the black wood delivering a powerful blow to his nose. He cried out involuntarily as the pain seized his nose and crushed it mercilessly, but no one came to his assistance. More than used to dealing with pain on his own, he simply balled up the edge of his shirt and held it to his nose, setting Teddy beside him to prevent soiling its fur with blood. He raised his head to notice that Selena was no longer screaming. Rather, she lay unmoving in her husband's dangerous arms like a tattered rag doll. Tony noted the needle that gleamed in his father's fist and snorted softly. A sedative. The solution to all his father's problems.

Unfortunately, his father caught his snort and frowned darkly at him.

"Is there something you find amusing, Anthony?" he inquired, his tone low and dangerous. Tony struggled to hold back the shiver that threatened to slither up his spine.

"No, father," he answered softly, barely managing to keep the waver out of his voice. His father sneered.

"Then get the hell out of here before I beat every last drop of shit out of you."

A second warning unnecessary, Tony grabbed his bear's paw and stumbled out, unable to summon enough energy to run. The last thing he heard before he collapsed on his bed was his father's cold, dangerous voice, directed at his servants.

"Take Ms. Sabrina to the burying ground, and get rid of her. I don't care how you do it. No one is to breathe a word of this to anyone, or the consequences will be anything but pleasant. Selena won't be around much longer anyways; I'll make sure of that."

**To be continued...**


End file.
